David Vining's Blog, page 4

40th Birthday Trip – Days 9 and 10, Final Day in Rome and Florence

As was our wont in Rome, our final full day was really only planned with one major attraction: the Colosseum. Of course, with the tickets to the Colosseum, you also get entry to the Imperial Forums, so it’s really two things.

Still, we actually started the day early, not quite as early as we had wanted because of tired legs and young boys, but early enough so that we could walk over to the Trevi Fountain for pictures with those young men.

Had to have them throw coins over their should...

40th Birthday Trip – Days 8 and 9, Final Day in Rome and Florence

As was our wont in Rome, our final full day was really only planned with one major attraction: the Colosseum. Of course, with the tickets to the Colosseum, you also get entry to the Imperial Forums, so it’s really two things.

Still, we actually started the day early, not quite as early as we had wanted because of tired legs and young boys, but early enough so that we could walk over to the Trevi Fountain for pictures with those young men.

Had to have them throw coins over their should...

George Wallace

I’m generally against biopics, but I’m happy to point to one where things just…work, and John Frankenheimer’s George Wallace is one that works. I kept thinking of Oliver Stone’s Nixon as I watched, another film about a controversial political figure from the same era, and how I felt like Stone just came to the conclusion that Richard Milhouse Nixon was simply insane, which was viewed as sympathetic by some critics for some reason. This, though, treats the governor of Alabama with the embrace...

40th Birthday Trip – Days 6 and 7, Pompeii and Rome

Day six was the second of two planned day trips from Rome, this time we brought our oldest along to Pompeii. The public transportation system didn’t want to agree with us this early, so we walked the whole way from our apartment to Termini, and along the way we passed the Trevi Fountain

not the best pic, I’ll admit

and this little discovery on Via Rasella.

It’s some graffiti on the wall by TVBoy. No idea what it’s supposed to mean, but it was pretty. Had to get a picture.

Anywa...

The Island of Dr. Moreau

There’s a certain level of embarrassment about the production of John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, having taken over after a handful of shooting days from Richard Stanley who was fired. Just, a series of pre-production assumptions and decisions, especially around monster design, that take a staccato, unengagingly bad film and make it…something else. Looking at the creature designs, I’m actually surprised Stanley made it to the first day of the shoot at all.  The creature designs...

Yasujiro Ozu: A Retrospective

Hyperbole has the opposite intended effect most of the time. We live in a saturated information age where anyone has a voice, and every voice wants to be heard. You don’t get attention by saying something is pretty good. You have to be loud, and saying things are the greatest or worst things ever becomes ever-present, making each successive declaration less convincing than the last. So, when someone with a (tiny) voice discovers something they genuinely think may be one of the best ever, one...

Sequels: A Choice

When something original and new gets sudden success in Hollywood, there’s the immediate need to capitalize on it. Sequels have always been a thing in Hollywood, extending back to the silent era with serials (William Wyler cut his teeth making serial westerns for Universal), but it was the 80s where Hollywood decided to make them a cornerstone of their financial well-being rather than an ashamed underbelly of cashflow that it had always been.

For decades, the question of how to approach se...

40th Birthday Trip – Days 4 and 5, Rome and Florence

Day four saw us returning to the Vatican, this time to go into St. Peter’s Basilica. My mother came to meet us at the apartment, and then we walked by the same route we had the day before to the central church building of the Catholic Church. We passed over the Ponte St. Angelo again,

going down the same road with the great views of St. Peter’s to the open arms of St. Peter’s Square…

which you can’t walk into. You have to go to the side to go through security.

Kind of kill...

Andersonville

Ted Turner is a Civil War nut with billions of dollars who made a series of long movies/miniseries about the conflict starting with Gettysburg, moving through this television miniseries, and finishing with Gods and Generals. Unable to get Rondald Maxwell back to film the second entry in what became something like an unofficial trilogy, Turner turned to workman filmmaker John Frankenheimer to see the project through to completion. Continuing his final major movement of his career, a return to...

40th Birthday Trip – Days 3 and 4, Venice and Rome

So, we woke up on the train from Munich, some of us barely having gotten any sleep at all. We didn’t get on until midnight. We got off the train at about 8. Best case scenario, that’s less than 8 hours, which is easy enough, but this wasn’t the best case scenario. Children were excited about trains. There were clothes to unpack in a tiny space. We had to find the bathroom and get everyone to use it. We needed to wake up before we pulled into the train station. We had to eat breakfast (rolls with...